Comcast deal for NBC Universal: Who has the real story?

There's no more perfect example of the crazily competitive and cutthroat atmosphere that has infected showbiz reporting than the wonderfully venomous reaction -- largely courtesy of Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke -- to The Wrap's Sharon Waxman's scoop that GE has been negotiating a deal with Comcast to unload NBC Universal. Waxman's story is bolstered by two sources that told the Wrap that "a deal has already been completed at a purchase price of $35 billion."

My colleague Joe Flint, who's also been following the story, also seems to believe a deal is in the works, though he is more cautious, saying Comcast is "kicking the tires" of NBC Universal, adding that "whether Comcast is making a serious run at all of NBC Universal outright or just acquiring a stake in the company or forming a joint venture remains to be seen." 

If there were ever a clear sign that GE is actually in serious talks with Comcast, it comes in the form of a comically obfuscatory companywide memo from NBC Uni chief Jeff Zucker, who pointedly doesn't deny that talks are taking place. He simply says (actually boasts might be a better way of describing it) that "given the attractive nature of our assets, there is always significant interest in NBC Universal." By assets, I'm assuming Zucker isn't talking about the potential DVD sales of "Love Happens."

Clearly torn by conflicting urges, Deadline Hollywood's Finke has been all over the map on the story, trying to nail down the actual deal while simultaneously trying to mock and disparage Waxman's scoop. Since The Wrap is Finke's leading rival in the entrepreneurial showbiz blog universe, there's been lots of passive-aggressive feuding between the reporters, even though it was Waxman who spotlighted the news that Finke had made a lucrative deal to sell her blog this year.

At any rate, Finke has been busily trying to belittle Waxman's Comcast story, even using a barnyard expletive to describe the story (one I'm not allowed to repeat here because of the LAT's decency standards) while also posting a screen grab of a page from the Huffington Post with various denials about the Comcast deal, headlined with "Tide Turns Against Waxman Report." However, a more recent Finke post now acknowledges that NBC Uni is in play, with "at least 5 or 6 interested parties vying for the studio including Comcast."

Where will it end? Clearly no one knows for sure. But you'd have to say that the blogosphere has given showbiz business reporting a huge shot in the arm since the squabbling over who's got the scoop has become even more fun to read than the stories about the deal itself.  

Nostradamus comes to Seattle radio: See the greatest sports prediction ever made!

If Mike Blowers actually knew anything about the movie business, I'd probably be calling him right now to ask who's going to be the new studio chief at Disney -- and Universal for that matter. Because in the prediction business, when you're hot, you're hot. For those who aren't lunatic baseball fans, Blowers was a journeyman third baseman for the Seattle Mariners who, except for one year when he hit 23 home runs, had trouble figuring out what pitch he was going to get, much less how to hit it.

But now that Blowers is a broadcaster for the Mariners, he's apparently developed some incredible psychic powers, as you can tell from watching this clip from "The Rachel Maddow Show" (hey, who knew she was a baseball fan?). Before the Mariners game Sunday in Toronto, Blowers was asked to predict something unusual that might happen. He responded with an outlandish scenario involving the team's rookie infielder, Matt Tuiasosopo, who'd just been called up from the minors (and yes, who is the son of former UCLA football great Manu Tuiasosopo).

Blowers predicted that, in his second at-bat, Tuiasosopo would work the count to 3-1, then hit a fastball to left-center for a home run into the second deck of Toronto's Rogers Centre. I'm not an oddsmaker, but I have to figure the odds of that happening are about as good as, well, Joel Silver getting the job of running Disney Studios. I mean, we're talking 10,000-to-1-type odds. But ... it happened, almost as exactly as Blowers predicted. Now that I think about it, maybe I'm going to call Blowers and, just to see if he hasn't lost his touch, ask him what the box office will be this weekend for "Whip It."

Meanwhile, see the prediction for yourself: 

Did Polanski documentary spur D.A.'s criminal chase?

Did the L.A. County district attorney's office go after Roman Polanski because they wanted revenge after getting a black eye in the recent Polanski documentary, "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired?"

That's the provocative theory floated by Newser's always provocative Michael Wolff, best known as the author of "The Man Who Owns the News," the wonderfully dishy recent biography of Rupert Murdoch. According to Wolff, it seems awfully strange that Polanski has been traveling to Switzerland for years -- he even has a home there -- without L.A. prosecutors managing to nab him until now.

So why did the D.A.'s office suddenly kick itself into gear? Here's the gist of Wolff's theory:

Arresting Polanski is about the L.A. prosecutor's office's public relations. Prosecutors ignored Polanski for 30 years because it was a terrible case in which the prosecutor's office and the sitting judge, in the interest of getting publicity for themselves, had conducted themselves in all variety of dubious ways. But then, last year, 'Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired' came out detailing all this dubiousness. So the first motivation for going after Polanski now, as it so often is with prosecutors, is revenge -- Polanski and this film makes the D.A. look bad.

Wolff adds that the documentary must have also served as a reminder, with Polanski traveling freely around Europe, that the D.A.'s office had turned a blind eye to his case. Now that the D.A.'s office has nabbed its fugitive, it no longer looks distracted or impotent. As Wolff puts it: "The headlines now sweeping the world are the prosecutor's ultimate benefit. Many careers are suddenly advanced."

There are a few holes in Wolff's theory, especially since I'm not so sure that the current inhabitants of the D.A.'s office are really so invested in defending the actions of their long-ago predecessors, especially since the documentary's most damning revelations involved the sitting judge, not the prosecutors. But with so many far more important cases sitting idle because of budget cuts and lack of manpower, it is hard to fathom why the D.A.'s office is suddenly spending time and money trying to re-energize an ancient sex case when there are so many more nasty characters so much closer to home who need to feel the strong arm of the law.

Photo: Roman Polanski. Credit: Los Angeles Times / UCLA Library of Special Collections

Why is Oprah giving Michael Moore the brushoff?

If you had your TV and radio blaring Wednesday, it was pretty much impossible to avoid seeing or hearing Michael Moore everywhere you turned as the portly filmmaker made the media rounds, touting his new film, "Capitalism: A Love Story," which opened that day in New York and Los Angeles. (It goes wide Oct. 2.) Moore was on "Good Morning America" and "Larry King Live," along with Howard Stern's radio show and Martha Stewart's syndicated TV show.

But what happened to his appearance on "Oprah," the show that every filmmaker, author and pop star would kill to appear on, since having Oprah's de facto endorsement sells more books, films and CDs than any other piece of TV real estate? When I turned on "Oprah," all I saw was Mackenzie Phillips, plugging her new book, which largely seems newsworthy because it reveals that as a teenager she frequently had sex with her father, John Phillips, the deceased founder of the Mamas and the Papas.

Oprah seemed sympathetic, repeatedly furrowing her lovely brow, but I have to admit that all I could think about was -- hey, where's Michael Moore? You may recall that we reported earlier this month that Overture Films, who's releasing Moore's film, had embargoed all interviews until this Wednesday, since Moore was scheduled to appear on "Oprah" Sept. 22. Eager to protect its exclusive, La Winfrey wanted all of Moore's appearances and interviews held until after he appeared on her show. (Moore was on Jay Leno's show last week, but that was scheduled before the Oprah appearance had been booked.)

But guess what? The embargo fell apart at some point in the past few weeks after Oprah mysteriously backed out of the Moore interview. While Overture hasn't given up all hope, insiders acknowledge that Moore is no longer on the Oprah schedule and say that its doubtful that a full-scale interview will ever occur.

The "Oprah" brain trust hasn't given any official reason for giving Moore the cold shoulder, But there are two theories floating around. No. 1: With his gift for gab and fondness for controversy, Moore is a great guest for most talk shows, but not "Oprah," which prefers some sort of dramatic revelation -- like, say, having sex with your pop -- which allows its host an opportunity to either empathize or offer a stern rebuke. No. 2: As one of the richest women in America who has turned herself into a hugely successful commercial brand, Oprah may have decided that she might leave herself open to charges of hypocrisy by hosting a show promoting a movie that preaches against the evils of capitalism.

I wouldn't worry about Moore, who has an unfailing knack for attracting media attention, so I suspect he'll still log plenty of more TV appearances in the coming days. But "Oprah," the Moby Dick of media opportunities, increasingly looks like the one that got away.  

PREVIOUSLY: MICHAEL MOORE AND OPRAH: A LOVE STORY?

PREVIOUSLY: HYPOCRISY WATCH: MICHAEL MOORE'S 'CAPITALISM' PREMIERES IN NEW YORK'S BIGGEST CAPITALIST OASIS

Photo of Oprah Winfrey by Chris Pizzello/AP.

Hypocrisy Watch: Michael Moore's 'Capitalism' premieres in N.Y.'s biggest capitalist oasis

The Wall Street Journal's sharp-eyed Deal Journal, which keeps track of the ups and downs of our most eminent corporate dealmakers, took time out this week to attend the New York premiere of Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story." As the Deal Journal's Michael Corkery notes in a surprisingly evenhanded report, having the film open at New York's Lincoln Center was a huge blunder, since it made Moore a fat target (no pun intended) for charges of hypocrisy.

After all, as Corkery puts it, the center's sleek new theater was largely funded "by the very institutions that Moore lambasts as greedy, sleazy and beyond repent. Before the film, the crowd sipped champagne and cocktails in the 'Morgan Stanley Lobby' and then headed to their seats in the 'Citi Balcony.' Movie tickets were available at the 'Bank of New York Box Office' and there's outdoor seating at the Credit Suisse Information Grandstand.' " (Geez, when you have to pee, do you think you can do your business at the Alan Greenspan Memorial Urinal?)

Corkery says there is "plenty of good entertainment" in Moore's film while acknowledging the emotional impact of some of the film's scenes, including one where Moore exposes how Wal-Mart profited from a life insurance policy it took out on a young woman who died unexpectedly, leaving behind a young family scrambling to make ends meet. But he also points out that Moore is often guilty of "throwing stones in a glass house he often frequents." Noting that Moore has gone from assembly line worker to well-compensated indie filmmaker, Corkery contends that "his journey alone exemplifies the social mobility made possible by the very economic system he savages in his latest film."

In an accompanying interview, Corkery gives Moore a chance to answer the apparent hypocrisy of having the film's debut in such an ornate temple of capitalist excess. The filmmaker's response: "I walked into the theater and saw the names of the banks and I said: This is what I do for a living -- irony. I am now piling irony on top of irony. These financial institutions should be giving their money away."

Personally, I'm a fan of the film. But I know what some of you are probably thinking: Hey, Michael, when it comes to giving away money, how about you first?

RELATED: 

Clash of Titans: Michael Moore vs. Manohla Dargis

Michael Moore hits pay dirt in Hollywood

Does Michael Moore get a free pass from the liberal media?

Michael Moore and Oprah: 'A Love Story'?

Photo of Michael Moore by Sean Kilpatrick / Associated Press

Bob Iger: Is he Disney's new Zen master?

Variety's Peter Bart has an intriguing post up today about Disney CEO Bob Iger. Instead of trying to explain why Iger booted out Dick Cook last Friday--and after all, no one's figured that mystery out yet--Bart offers a shrewd assessment of how Iger has ruled the Disney roost in the past few years, noting that Iger has brought a zen-like calm to the Disney empire that was sorely missing in the tumultuous Eisner-Katzenberg years.

As Bart puts it: "Iger is clearly a man who understands that, on many levels, he has the best job in town, and he projects the resulting equanimity," adding that since Iger inherited Eisner's job, "the Magic Kingdom seems to have picked up a new vigor and self-confidence along the way." Bart points out that while Eisner was always in the middle of some traumatic, headline-inducing drama--the "bizarre" Michael Ovitz experiment,  the $280 million settlement with Jeffrey Katzenberg, the "incessant intrigues" with Steve Jobs, Roy Disney and Joe Roth, not to mention Iger himself, Iger has made a series of canny deals involving Pixar, Dreamworks and Marvel while "carefully cultivating strong relationships with a range of complex individuals," notably Jobs, John Lasseter, Spielberg and Marvel's Ike Perlmutter, who Bart coyly describes as "quixotic," which is apparently Variety-ese for "difficult."

It's true that most people in town, including the ones I've spoken to about Iger's handling of Cook's abrupt departure, find Iger largely unknowable. He's a quick study, but he plays his cards close to the vest. It's a quality you find in a lot of ambitious modern day corporate chiefs, who seem to have all been trained to keep any uncomfortable thoughts or turbulent emotions buried deep inside their nice suits. It's a big departure from the days of Eisner, Barry Diller, Jonathan Dolgen and Larry Gordon, showbiz lions who all knew how to express their anger and frustration with the loudest of roars. 

As Bart concludes: "If Iger can cause anxiety, what he infuses most of all is calm." But right now anxiety reigns supreme, both inside Disney and out, as everyone wonders what lies in store for the future of the venerable Hollywood studio.  

   

Clash of Titans: Michael Moore vs. Manohla Dargis

No American film critic wields a poison pen quite like the New York Times' Manohla Dargis, who is a brilliant stylist and savvy critical thinker even if she can often be counted on to fall in love with films that have utterly no commercial prospects outside of Manhattan's Angelika Film Center. It's a special treat to read Dargis' reports from film festivals, since they tend to read like sneak previews of her future reviews.

Dargis is famous for lowering the boom in her festival coverage, whether it was her 2007 dispatch from Sundance, in which she wrote off "Hounddog" as "overinflated rubbish," or her 2005 Sundance overview, in which she airily dismissed "Hustle & Flow" not just as "rubbish" but "precisely the kind of rubbish movie executives seek at Sundance." Dargis even called out a female studio executive who was in the audience, engaging in the cardinal sin of laughing at some of the movie's jokes that Dargis had determined to be especially crude and sexist.  

The common denominator with both of those movies was the huge amount of media uproar that had accompanied their arrival at the festival. Dargis clearly prefers underdog projects to media sensations, which is especially bad news for Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story," a new documentary that has already been riding a tsunami of media attention. Although Moore is a one-man marketing machine with an uncanny ability to court tumult, he still needs good reviews to broaden his audience beyond the die-hard liberals and issue-oriented activists who make up much of his core audience.

So Overture Films, which is releasing "Capitalism," had to be especially glum reading Dargis' Thursday essay, which made it pretty clear that the acerbic critic was underwhelmed by the movie. She described it as "a soft look at our hard times," adding ominously that "I will have more to say about [it] next Wednesday when it opens in New York and Los Angeles."

Dargis doesn't neccessarily review everything that she sees at a festival, but based on her brief comments from Toronto, I've compiled a brief scorecard of review predictions:

Giddy delights:

Werner Herzog's "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans": "One of the best movies of his career.... Mr. Herzog take[s] you into a hell that leads straight to movie heaven."

Solid praise:

"Colony": "A satisfying addition to the blooming, buzzing field of social issue documentary."

"Collapse": "[An] elegantly structured if not unproblematic documentary."

"City of Life and Death": "A phantasmagoric vision in which decapitated heads swing from ropes like pendulums in front of mountains of rubble and billowing smoke." 

Grim tidings:

Don Roos' "Love and Other Impossible Pursuits": "Mr. Roos overworks his material into a sudsy pulp."

"Jennifer's Body": "A horror throwaway starring Megan Fox as a cannibalistic hottie."

"Life During Wartime": "Todd Solondz's hateful, would-be comedy."

Did George Clooney really tell a lady she was fat?

George Clooney is easily the most quotable actor of our time, as he proved once again at a press conference in Toronto promoting "Up in the Air," where he aired his disdain for social networking by quipping: "I would rather have a rectal examination on live TV by a fellow with cold hands than have a Facebook page." (I think it's the "fellow with cold hands" detail that really makes it such a great line.)

So when I saw a post this morning on Vulture, one of my favorite blogs, headlined: "George Clooney Told a Lady She Was Fat," I couldn't resist reading the item, which linked to a piece Clooney had written for the Daily Mail explaining why it bugs him that everyone in the world today feels obligated to offer an opinion on every possible subject, no matter how hurtful or offensive the opinion might be.

Clooney's Daily Mail story was introduced by a delightful anecdote about him meeting a woman at a party who volunteered that she hated his last movie, disagreed with his politics and -- just to twist the knife in a little further -- thought he looked older in person than on screen. Finally, Clooney says he'd had enough. "I smiled very politely and said, 'You know, those 35 extra pounds of weight you're carrying -- they look just fantastic on you.' "

LOL, right? But why was Clooney, who's so busy these days that he had two movies opening this week at the Toronto Film Festival, taking time out to opine about modern-day manners? On a whim, I e-mailed the Mail story to Stan Rosenfield, Clooney's longtime spokesman, asking if the piece was authentic. Stan e-mailed George, who responded: "Nope. I never wrote that. Never have."

It was a hoax, just like the one a few months back that had Clooney being killed in a plane crash. Amazingly, everyone on the Web just went ahead and ran his or her own clever post on the Clooney "column" from the Daily Mail without bothering to check whether it was true or not. When I asked Rosenfield for his take on what this says about the modern-day media, he responded: "I'm not shocked that the Daily Mail published the story. But I am shocked that you actually called me to check it out. I hope you don't get in trouble with your editor for doing this."

Photo: George Clooney. Credit: Kevork Djansezian / Associated Press.

Does Michael Moore get a free pass from the liberal media?

Judging from all the fear and loathing and sheer snarkiness emanating out of the conservative blogosphere, you'd think that Michael Moore was nearly as big a threat to a free society as Hugo Chavez and the Obama healthcare plan. According to conservative blogger Christian Toto, among others, the liberal media is always giving Moore a free pass. He expects a similarly one-sided reception for the filmmaker's upcoming documentary, "Capitalism: A Love Story," which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival before heading to Toronto (it opens in Los Angeles later this month).

In a post he wrote for Big Hollywood, Toto claims that Moore is "always" guaranteed rave reviews from most film critics, softball questions in interviews and a huge dose of ticket-selling Oscar buzz. I'm not saying Toto is wrong, though I'd argue that the media makes just as big a fuss about plenty of other filmmakers (starting with Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Michael Mann) simply because it's infatuated with their films, not because it endorses or even cares about their politics.

At any rate, Variety has the first authoritative review up of Moore's film -- and it hardly reads like a liberal valentine, with just as many caveats as kudos. It calls "Capitalism" one of Moore's best films but goes on to say: "There's still plenty here to annoy right-wingers, as well as those who, however much they agree with Moore's politics, just can't stomach his oversimplification, on-the-nose sentimentality and goofball japery." 

The movie features home movie footage of Moore as a towheaded child, "visibly overjoyed to be visiting Wall Street on a vacation to New York from his hometown of Flint, Michigan," as well as a sequence in which Moore and his dad visit the vacant lot that had been the location of the factory where Moore Sr. once worked (I'm guessing that is one of the scenes that inspired the Variety reviewer, Leslie Felperin, to call Moore out for on-the-nose sentimentality). It sounds like the funniest scene involves Moore attempting to find a banker who can explain the concept behind derivatives. When he finally corners a Wall Street type and asks him for some advice, the banker instantly responds: "Stop making films!"

The likelihood of that? Less than zero. Here's the trailer, which is a hoot"

Photo: Michael Moore. Credit: Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times.

Michael Moore and Oprah: 'A Love Story'?

When it comes to the most eagerly anticipated movie showing at next week's Toronto Film Festival, the hands-down winner has to be Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story." Arriving 20 years after the debut of "Roger & Me," it is being billed as Moore's magnum opus on the horrific impact of corporate dominance on the lives of everyday Americans, which means that the film should spark a conflagration of debate between Moore's always ferocious advocates and detractors.

But when I called Overture Films, which is releasing the film later this month, eager to set up an interview with Moore, I got bad news. The filmmaker was willing to do interviews after the film premieres in Toronto on Sept. 16, but Overture said that all interviews were embargoed until Sept. 23, the day of the film's release in New York and Los Angeles. Why? Because Moore is doing a sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey, which won't air until Sept. 22. And if Oprah wants an exclusive, she gets it, since when it comes to books, movies or music, no one offers a better promotional platform than La Winfrey.

Of course, this being the modern-media age, the embargo isn't quite as tightly shrink-wrapped as it first sounded. It turns out that the New York Times has a big Sunday feature interview with Moore scheduled to run on Sept. 20, while Jay Leno has booked a Moore appearance a few days earlier. Since both of those interviews were booked pre-Oprah, they've been allowed to wiggle out from under the embargo.

This puts a reporter-blogger like myself in a tricky spot. Like most journalists, I want to run my stories as competitively as possible. But if I agree to an embargo, my story would definitely lack a lot of sparks, having to come after both Oprah and the New York Times. I've also never held a story from a film festival. The whole idea of covering a festival, especially for a blogger, is to provide timely reaction and analysis to the big events of the day.

I'll be huddling with my editors, figuring out how we plan to cover the movie. But I'd be curious to hear from readers: Is it worth the wait to hear from Michael Moore? Or should I just see the film and offer my own thoughts in a more timely manner? What do you think?